By William Mackay: Lately in the past week, Floyd Mayweather Jr. has been taking credit for supposedly ruining Hatton as a fighter by knocking him out in the 10th round in their December 2007 bout. While Hatton did end up getting knocked out in the fight, it wasn’t anything close to being a particularly nasty knockout like the one that Hatton suffered in his 2nd round knockout loss to Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd.
However, Mayweather still feels that his knockout started the ball rolling and subsequently broke down Hatton’s punch resistance for later fights against Juan Lazcano and Pacquiao. It’s a point that is almost impossible to prove because there were other things that may have contributed to Hatton being hurt in his fight with Lazcano and then later knocked out by Pacquiao, such as Hatton’s drinking, overeating and ballooning up in weight between fights.
None of that could have helped Hatton, and it may just be that Hatton’s lifestyle caught up with him after his bout with Mayweather. Hatton put on a great deal of weight after the Mayweather loss, as he looked positively huge in the video and photos just a month after the fight.
It’s hard to imagine that Hatton could have put so much weight on so quickly, because looked like he had swelled up like a beach ball in such a short period of time.
Just having to take that weight off and try to compete afterwards much have been a formidable task for Hatton, and I can’t imagine how he was able to fight as well as he did against Lazcano after having lost so much weight. Hatton had always put on weight between fights, but I had never seen him as large as he was following the Mayweather bout.
It may just be that Hatton ate himself in the position where he couldn’t take as hard a punch as before. When a fighter starts screwing around with putting on and dropping weight in between fights it has a way of messing up their ability to fight effectively.
I don’t know whether this effects how they take a head shot, but I’ve seen many fighters lose after having taken off a ton of weight in training camps (fat farms) before a fight. Look at Erik Morales and Fernando Vargas as two shining examples of fighters that put on a ton of weight after a fight and then had to take it all off, leaving them much more vulnerable than they were before they started packing on all that weight in the first place.
It may be that there’s a point of no return for fighters that put on a lot of weight, and once they’ve reached certain amount of weight that they’ve put on, they’re not the same fighter afterwards. No doubt it’s different for each fighter, because some fighters like George Foreman put on an incredible amount of weight when he was retired for 10 years.
However, in Foreman’s case, once he took most of it off, he stayed around the same weight for the rest of his career. Foreman didn’t let himself go in between fights like Hatton was doing.
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